When to clean up?

Lachrymology

Hi all,

I'm interested in the fact, when to clean up the build. I'm using the source from the archive, not from the git repro.

I know there are two clean commands:

nmake clean
nmake distclean

When should one of them be executed?
○ After the chain configure, nmake, nmake install, nmake docs?

Which of them is needed?

What do they do?

Best regards,
Mike

jsulm

@Lachrymology See here https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/what-is-the-difference-between-make-distclean-and-make-clean-284353/
When to call it? Well, when you don't need the build artefacts anymore.

koahnig

@Lachrymology

distclean is used when you want to reconfigure a build of Qt. After distclean it should be the same as a fresh download and ready for new configuration and compilation. All intermediate and end results of a configuration shall be gone afterwards.

clean is to delete intermediate results which are not required. A start of (n)make after clean will have to do typically the whole compilation of application and/or library. A rebuild is clean plus build.

Lachrymology

Hi @jsulm thanks for the link.

@koahnig Thanks for the explanation.

I went through some Makefiles of Qt now trying to understand it a bit better.

As far as I understand it correctly:
clean will remove all through (n)make built files like *.obj, *.exp, *.ilk, *.idb, etc. (but not all built files, because)
distclean will remove files created through configure and (n)make too like *.bat, *.lib, *.exe, *.pdb, Makefiles, etc.

So clean is at the end only needed to reduce HDD memory usage after the build is finished and distclean to have a new fresh build, right?

Best regards,
Mike

koahnig

@Lachrymology said in When to clean up?:

So clean is at the end only needed to reduce HDD memory usage after the build is finished and distclean to have a new fresh build, right?

Yes. Personally I consider distclean as more important to avoid frustration while building Qt libs with a different configuration for instance. However, I prefer to unzip code once again to ensure that nothing is left.

A clean as stand-alone, I am rarely doing. Typically I do a rebuild.

Coming a long way from much smaller HDD, it is amazing what today's HDD/SSDs can hold. Therefore, I tend to forget to use clean.

Lachrymology

@koahnig

Got it. Thanks. 😊